undefined - Garrett Felber presents the life and writings of Martin Sostre, in conversation with Paul Coates
Garrett Felber presents the life and writings of Martin Sostre, in conversation with Paul Coates
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Garrett Felber presents "I Cannot Submit to Injustices: Collected Works of Martin Sostre" and "A Continuous Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Martin Sostre" in conversation with Paul Coates The first biography and the complete collected writings of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism “Now that Garrett Felber has given us such a deeply researched and compelling biography of Martin Sostre, Sostre’s pivotal and far-reaching contributions to the movement against prisons and the broader abolitionist movement can no longer be ignored. This book is more than a biography of a single individual—it charts the collective work that guides us today.” —Angela Y. Davis _A Continuous Struggle _is a political biography of one of the most important—if since forgotten—revolutionary figures of the twentieth century in the United States. Martin Sostre (1923–2015) was a Black Puerto Rican from East Harlem who became a politicized prisoner and jailhouse lawyer, winning cases in the early 1960s that helped secure the constitutional rights of incarcerated people. He opened one of the country’s first radical Black bookstores and was scapegoated and framed by police and the FBI following the Buffalo rebellion of 1967. He was sentenced by an all-white jury to thirty-one to forty-one years. Throughout his nine-year imprisonment, Sostre transformed himself and the revolutionary movements he was a part of, eventually identifying as a revolutionary anarchist and laying the foundation for contemporary Black anarchism. During that time, he engaged in principled resistance to strip frisks, for which he was beaten eleven times, raising awareness about the routinized sexual assault of imprisoned people. The decade-long Free Martin Sostre movement was one of the greatest and most improbable defense campaign victories of the Black Power era, alongside those to liberate Angela Davis and Huey Newton. Although Sostre receded from public view after his release in 1976, he lived another four decades of committed struggle as a tenant organizer and youth mentor in New York and New Jersey. Throughout his long life, Martin Sostre was a jailhouse lawyer, revolutionary bookseller, yogi, mentor and teacher, anti-rape organizer, housing justice activist, and original political thinker. The variety of strategies he used and terrains on which he struggled emphasize the necessity and possibility of multi-faceted and continuous struggle against all forms of oppression in pursuit of an egalitarian society founded on the principles of “maximum human freedom, spirituality, and love.”
I Cannot Submit to Injustices is a collection of works by Black Puerto Rican revolutionary Martin Sostre. As a founding figure of both the prison abolition movement and contemporary Black anarchism, Sostre’s eminence as a political thinker and tireless activist continues to gain wider recognition. These texts represent decades of Sostre’s work as an agitator, teacher, and intellectual in the face of intense state repression, including years in solitary confinement as punishment for his activism. While in prison, Sostre established radical study groups and lending libraries, published several revolutionary newspapers, organized chapters of the Black Panther Party, and fought for the rights of incarcerated workers. A self-taught lawyer, Sostre’s strategy was to struggle on the offensive, pressing legal battles that established the constitutional rights of prisoners and refusing to submit to body searches by guards he deemed state-sanctioned sexual assault, for which he was beaten nearly a dozen times. With never-before-published interviews and speeches alongside powerful essays reproduced for the first time since their original publication, this volume offers readers overdue access to Sostre’s ideas about anarchism, armed struggle, and Black liberation in his own words.
Garrett Felber is an educator, writer, and organizer. They are the author of Those Who Know Don’t Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State and coauthor of The Portable Malcolm X Reader, with Manning Marable. Felber is a cofounder of the abolitionist collective Study and Struggle and is currently building a radical mobile library, the Free Society People's Library, in Portland, Oregon.
W. Paul Coates is the founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing. Black Classic Press, founded in 1978, specializes in republishing obscure and significant works by and about people of African descent. BCP Digital Printing was founded in 1995 as a parallel entity of the Press. The printing company uses state of the art digital technology to produce books and documents On Demand. The acquisition of digital printing technology distinguishes the press from other small publishing companies and places Black Classic Press on the forefront of 21st century technology. As a former African American Studies manuscript and reference librarian at Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Mr. Coates was responsible for the collection and acquisition of African American books and related materials, including the selection and purchase of rare and non-rare items. A former member of the Black Panther Party, he led the effort to establish the Black Panther Archives at Howard. Mr. Coates is a graduate of Atlanta University's School of Library and Information Studies, and SDC/Antioch University, from which he received as a distinguished alumni, the Doctorate in Philosophy, Honoris Causa in 2015. He is an active Black bibliophile and collector of cultural artifacts. Mr. Coates is co-editor of Black Bibliophiles and Collectors: Preservers of Black History (Howard Univ. Press). He was a founding member and chair of the National Association of Black Book Publishers. In addition, he served as adjunct instructor of African American Studies at Sojourner-Douglass College, Baltimore, MD. He formerly owned and operated The Black Book (1972-1978), a Baltimore-based bookstore. His experience with the purchase, sale, and collection of books by and about Blacks is a love affair that has continued more than six decades.
